Author
Topic: 64 bit V 32 bit (Read 2038 times)

I'm looking at running LinuxMCE and building my own HTPC and at the virginal stages of research ... so one of the things I'm looking at is 64 bit V 32 bit and from what I can see LinuxMCE comes in both but 64 bit seems to be out of favour? This thread - http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=6777.0 gave me that impression.

There is a somewhat formless, subjective prevaling opinion that the AMD64 version is a little less stable than the i386 version under 0710. While this stability question has not really been thoroughly substantiated, there are definitely a small number of minor things that are known not to work, or be buggy in the 64 version compared with the 32. And given that in a product like LMCE 64bit really doesn't give you a material performance benefit, most people are just taking the simpler and safer path and going with i386.

I am currently running the 64 bit version of LMCE. I want to switch back but everything is currently working and I don't want to mess with anything at the moment. I am hoping there is a way to switch to 32bit from 64 when I do my upgrade to LMCE 8.10.... If there is an easy way to change back to 32bit now I am all ears.

Thanks to you both. I was looking for a performance gain by going to 64 bit and if it's of marginal benefit and there's a few issues 32 bit seems like a no brainer.

I'll try not to ask too many stupid questions along the way. I have plenty of IT experience but ALL in the Windows space, I've never installed any distro even for a look before. So I've decided to use LinuxMCE and now I'm selecting hardware. Although I'm a little miffed at no Blu Ray support, but I do understand the reasoning behind the current position. It's no big deal though, hopefully decent content will be available for streaming from the web instead of buying a disc of any kind soon. Like an evolution of netflix. I'm planning on a lot of RAID protected storage.

My issue with the 64bit version, is that when I play a video, the image freezes for 10 - 20 seconds randomly... So a video of 45min can get 5 -10 freezes... On the same MD if I edit it to be a i386 and rebuild, videos play fine.

The strange thing is that the video freeze is only on my SD media. MKV x264 plays with no freeze, but get green artifacts.

I see no improvements to playing media in the 64bit version as it is now in 7.10 rc2.

Would using 64-bit help if using over 2TB of hdd space? I know it has to do with the filesystem type and not a larger block of addressable memory.

No, the 2TB relates to using legacy MBR/BIOS boot partition tables and is not related to CPU architecture at all - a CPU does not communicate directly with a harddrive so the architecture is irrelevant. In fact this limitation is nothing to do with HDD architecture either, it is simply a "soft" limitation on how large legacy partition tables can describe a partition to be. If you use a GPT partition table you will suffer no such limitation (it maximum partition size is millions if not billions of times larger from memory!) there is a thread somewhere that talks about GPT and LMCE but I can't remember if the conclusion was LMCE is happy with them. There is no obvious reason why not, but note that the DVD creates its own legacy paritions so you will need to use the CDs...

I would have thought that the lighter footprint of Linux on a box wouldn't necessitate buckets of RAM. I had intended on 4GB for it, not because of having any limitation in mind but more because I didn't think the machine would need more than that. And I can always chuck more in later.

I would have thought that the lighter footprint of Linux on a box wouldn't necessitate buckets of RAM. I had intended on 4GB for it, not because of having any limitation in mind but more because I didn't think the machine would need more than that. And I can always chuck more in later.

Is that a fair assumption?

LMCE itself will need nowhere near that much memory, 1G for a hybrid should be more then sufficient.